DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Monday nights on Maui, the place to be is Mulligan’s on the Blue. A band called Gypsy Pacific has a standing gig, and they’re worth the drive. They play “gypsy jazz,” the music of Django Reinhardt — not a name that appears in my CD collection, but that will change now.

Their website describes them as a string quartet, which is technically true, but if that conjures images of a cello or old white guys with powdered wigs, think again. And pass me another Guinness while you’re at it. The instrumentation is upright bass, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, and violin, 20 strings and 40 fingers in all, and most of them were a blur. These guys have some seriously fast hands.

See some good pictures of the band on Mulligan’s website.

“I need to get a photo of Spam Sushi. Is there any way to do that without actually eating it?”

“Sure, although you’ll have to spend the $1.75 to order it.”

“Oh, well, I hate to waste food.”

“It’s not really food.”

“Good point.”

The Maui Flea Market is a combination street fair and farmer’s market. From handcarved Koa utensils to passionfruit-flavored butter to knockoff Nike swoosh T-shirts to heaps of organic fruit, the 50¢ entry fee covers a lot of ground.

My favorite booth was staffed by an enormous Hawaiian woman and her equally huge machete. Piled on a table to her front, and filling the bed of a pickup to her rear were hundreds of young coconuts. The woman’s partner, an elderly man sacked out in the front seat of the pickup with his flip-flops hanging out the driver’s side window, prepped the nuts by whacking off the green husk with a large carving knife… but only after being bellowed at by the woman, who was running out of stock.

$3 buys a coconut, served with one tip expertly chopped off, and two straws. Most customers simply drank the water and ditched the coconut, but we stuck around to have the nuts split open (no extra charge) so we could scrape out the meat with a sharp piece of shell. If you get a really young one, the insides are still jelly.

Photos from Maui

Most musicians will tell you there are good days for tracking and bad days for tracking. I remember, back in 1994 or so when JAR was in the studio, one of the engineers made a passing comment about “one-take Jake,” the mythical musician who could nail his part on the first pass, with all the energy, magic, and spontaneity that that implies. The concept became a sort of grail, although I’m not sure any of us achieved it. I remember starting one song three times; I couldn’t even nail the first downbeat.

Digital recording has done for music what digital cameras have done for photographers; tape, like film, is free. So the material cost of doing 30 takes is a lot lower, and even if the time consumed is just as long, at least we’re not paying $100/hr.

But still, if you play something 30 times in a row, you won’t want to hear it again. Ever. Nothing robs a melody of its subtlety and passion like playing it badly a bunch of times in a row.

I was thinking about this the other day, at about take #12. My main musical collaborator, Andrew the six-fingered bassist, had pitched me a song we’d recorded rhythm tracks for in 2000. He’d ordered a dulcimer line, momentarily mistaking me for a composer. Despite my relative inexperience, though, I came up with a cool line for the verse. Andrew liked it. I liked it. The only problem was I couldn’t actually play it.

It was a 16th-note pattern that required crossing one hand under the other to hit the low A, blind, about a foot away from the rest of the melody. My success rate was about 50%. The strings on this dulcimer are less than an inch apart; even the pros have to watch their hands.

This provided little consolation, though. I gave up for the day before deciding that the best way to cope with my progress would be by putting a foot through the dulcimer’s soundboard.

The ultimate solution came in two parts. First I swapped right for left, relearning the pattern with opposite hands. Next I realized that the top half of the melody could be played lower on the instrument, physically closer to that hard-to-reach A. With that, and a night off, I was able to track the final version quickly:

Domino, final dulcimer take (verse 2, prechorus, verse 3, prechorus) (Copyright © 2005 matthew mcglynn)

The ATA flight to Maui offered “snack service.” The snack turned out to be a shrinkwrapped box of name-brand junkfood, a six-course feast of chemically-enhanced salted fats. Not that that prevented us from decimating it, of course; I hadn’t managed to convince myself that paying $9.99 for a plate of reconstituted eggs at the airport cafe would provide anything resembling sustenance.

Here’s a breakdown of what ATA considers a suitable snack:

The snack service was followed up with another snack, in case anyone needed a little refreshment, a little pick-me-up after becoming torpid and logy following the artificially-colored and -flavored assault of the first round. But this snack was nearly as bad: a 2-pack of cookies (refined flour, sugar, butter) and a foil pouch of pretzels (refined flour, salt, partially hydrogenated heart stopper). To be fair, the second round was healthier than the first, but only because it was just one-third the size.

So, altogether, less toxic than the stonner, but still not something you’d want to make a habit of. I was beginning to have lustful thoughts for those powdered eggs.